The popularity of the smartphone has spread worldwide in recent years, and for many the smartphone has become a necessity in daily life. The smartphone has added so much to life in general, but is causing some problems also. Most people will agree in that the biggest problem we see with the popularity of the smartphone is rampant occurrences of the “walking while looking at the smartphone screen” phenomenon observed daily everywhere in the world. The core of the problem is the user interface of the smartphone that generally requires the user to operate the smartphone in the view/touch interface mode, in which the user views the display screen and touches or swipes it to navigate/operate it.
Currently available alternative user interface systems that alleviate the problem of having to watch the display screen of the smartphone include the voice/voice interface in which the smartphone and the user both use voice to interact each other as seen in voice assistance systems such as Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Blackberry's Blackberry Assist. Though these interface systems do not require looking at the display all of the time, because they work within a larger visual/touch interface environment, operation of the smartphone completely without looking at the display screen is generally impossible. Besides, the voice input can be inaccurate in some cases, and cannot be used in the environment where other people are around in close vicinity like in a crowded train.
This inventor believes that the way to completely free the smartphone user from the need to watch the display screen (as we experience while we are walking) is to equip the smartphone with a keyboard that enables touch typing, in which the user does not have to watch the keyboard to know which function or a character is assigned to each key. By adopting such a keyboard in the smartphone that is equipped with the voice output software and applications, we will be able to create the voice/key interface, in which the smartphone uses voice and the user uses key inputs to interact each other. If applications, for example, such as Facebook and Twitter, are made operable under the voice/key interface mode, the user should be able to access those applications without having to watch the smartphone's display screen. In the keyboard operable in such a system, keys are assigned not only characters and ordinary functions we see on the top surfaces of the keys of ordinary keyboards but also logos that represent application icons.
It is this inventor's opinion that the keyboard that enables touch typing will not only able to prevent “looking at the display screen while walking on the street,” but also able to create a productive work environment anywhere outside the worker's office by enabling the user use the smartphone with specially designed goggles for office work and the cloud computing service.